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Poster #58 - Parent-Child Reciprocity Moderates the Association between Household Environment and Toddlers’ Behavior Problems

Fri, March 22, 12:45 to 2:00pm, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 1, Exhibit Hall B

Integrative Statement

Living in a chaotic household heightens risk for early behavior problems for a number of reasons, including exposure to stress stemming from noise and disorder and concomitant lack of routines (Evans & Wachs, 2010). However, not all children who experience high levels of household chaos will develop serious behavior problems. Additionally, the presence of positive, and lack of negative, parenting behaviors is associated with more adaptive child development (e.g., Bayer, Sanson, & Hemphill, 2006; Rubin, Burgess, & Hastings, 2002). Therefore, strong parent-child relationships may protect children who live in disorderly contexts from developing behavior problems. Accordingly, the current study examined household chaos, parent-child interactions, and their interplay as predictors of behavior problems among toddlers from low-income families. Household chaos was hypothesized to be associated with higher levels of internalizing and externalizing behavior problems. However, reciprocity in parent-toddler interactions was expected to moderate the association between household chaos and behavior problems, such that higher reciprocity was expected to buffer the hypothesized association between household chaos and toddler behavior problems.
Participants consisted of 88 at-risk, low-income mother-child dyads recruited in a large city as part of a larger study on child social, emotional, and cognitive development. 92.1% of participants were African-American; 5% were Caucasian. 58.4% of participants were male. During the 3-year-old lab visit, mothers completed The Confusion, Hubbub, and Order Scale (CHAOS; Matheny, Wachs, Ludwig, & Phillips, 1995), which assesses household chaos. The Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL; Achenbach & Rescorla, 2001) was administered to assess toddler internalizing, externalizing, and overall behavior problems. Further, the mother-child dyads were videotaped during a series of parent-child interaction tasks, including a difficult teaching task. Coders scored the videotapes for multiple dimensions of maternal, child, and dyadic behavior, including dyadic reciprocity, which assessed shared positive affect, harmony, and synchrony during the interaction (M ICC = .80).
The above hypotheses were partially supported. After controlling for child sex, household chaos was the only significant predictor of toddler externalizing problems (see Table 1). Household chaos was also a significant predictor of internalizing problems. In addition, there was a significant interaction between household chaos and parent-toddler reciprocity when predicting internalizing problems (see Table 1 and Figure 1). Simple slopes analyses indicated that household chaos was strongly associated with internalizing problems when the parent-toddler dyad demonstrated low (-1 SD) levels of reciprocity, β = .68, p < .001. However, when the parent-toddler dyad demonstrated high (+1 SD) levels of reciprocity, there was no significant association between household chaos and child internalizing problems, β = -0.07, p = .68.
These findings suggest that parent-child relationships high in reciprocity, characterized by shared positive affect and harmony during interactions, may help protect against negative influences of a chaotic environment on the early development of symptoms of anxiety and depression. Further, the findings suggest that it may be useful to address both the quality of the parent-child relationship and the broader household environment, including chaos, when designing programs to reduce risk for early internalizing problems.

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